Compare it to this: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/archived_proje...
Would like more clarification on the saturated fats front, though (compare coconut oil, butter, palm oil, trans fats).
Has anyone got some background on this, is it part of a larger policy? Is it going to be added to, or is this it now?
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...
This seems mostly in line with what I read in "The Mostly Plant Diet" [1]:
> Fats: Especially avoid trans fats and vegetable (seed) oils, but also other cooking oils, even olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, etc. Enjoy whole olives, whole coconut, whole avocados, whole walnuts, and whole sesame seeds instead. They are naturally packaged with many nutrients and fiber, which is stripped out when processed to make oil.
Mac and cheese with a veggie twist
* 375 mL (1 ½ cups) whole grain macaroni or fusilli * 10 mL (2 tsp) soft non-hydrogenated margarine
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/2/20/8076961/brazil-food-guide
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/brazils-revolutio...
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...
Having watched this video though, it presents a fringe view on dietary lipids, and is full of dubious logic. The presenter gains academic credos by flashing up various small studies very briefly, but never examines their interpretability, nor considers the counterpoint.
Perhaps there is a larger issues here of vegans over-eating poor quality lipids, which he is trying to address.
In any case, this one appears pretty similar to the Dutch one, so I guess that that's a good sign. The Dutch one recommends specific portions (250g of vegetables for an adult, for example), but I think in similar ratios as shown on that example plate, and similar products.
Here is one instance of an easily accessible peer-reviewed-science-based list of the current knowledge on dietary fat: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/t/fat
It does not show that oils or fat are something to blanket avoid.
Avoid (cheap) vegetable oils such as sunflower and rapeseed oils and the derived products with hydrogenated oils, such as margarines.
It's the same case for Canada's food guide? They're not making it available in other languages except English and French.
Also, this health guide lists sunflower and "cheap" canola as examples of good unsaturated fats.
Then following some broken links to https://www.voedingscentrum.nl, here is The Netherlands Nutrition Centre's English home page: https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/nl/service/english.aspx where following some more broken links you get to their "Wheel of Five", "the practical information tool used by the Netherlands Nutrition Centre to give examples of healthy dietary patterns": https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/Assets/Uploads/voedingscentru...
(I don't speak Dutch, and I feel silly pointing out that national dietary guidelines make most sense in national languages, and that English happens to be a national language of Canada.)
That's not true, another human myth.
here is the paper, TLDR: olive oil retains most of its nutritional benefits even when heated in high temperatures.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf020506w
go for healthy fat! :)
Unsaturated fats are at a much higher risk of oxidation, which is why cooking with canola oil (7.4% saturated, 28.1% polyunsaturated), for instance, is so dangerous – without the hydrogen armor around the carbon backbone, the fat is at high risk for oxidation, after which point it becomes toxic.
The study you linked to even alludes to this danger: > It is worth noting that all the heating methods assayed resulted in more severe polyphenols losses and oil degradation for Arbequina than for Picual oil, which could be related to the lower content in polyunsaturated fatty acids of the latter olive cultivar. These findings may be relevant to the choice of cooking method and olive oil cultivar to increase the intake of olive polyphenols.
Suggesting that if you want to cook at higher heats with olive oil, you should search for one with an exceptionally low polyunsat content.
I’ve seen macaroni and cheese recipes that should have been called mayonnaise w/ pasta. One recipe for Spanish rice, wish I’d saved the url just to prove it existed, called for ketchup and soy sauce. I’m not sure if that was a prison recipe or if someone actually thought it was good and served it to their family.
IMO there is a huge need for curation and review on the recipe sites, not just the mindless screen scraping that’s been the norm for so long. And you might not know it from watching the food network but there are other genres of food besides Italian and “tacos”.
It's not perfect, but it's a good start.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...
https://www.oliveoilmarket.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3.p...
Just serve pasta with olive oil, some sort of acid (lemon juice, rotating cast of vinegars, tomatoes), and maybe a little grated sharp cheese if you really need that.
Honestly, I'd rather just eat barley, farro, or bulgur in a bowl than try to force whole grains into crumbly pasta. But I guess that's a matter of taste.
The big problem with this dish is the relative lack of umami. Sauteed mushrooms (shitake, portabella) really help here if you don't want to use meat. Or nutritional yeast really does the trick here. Depending on your palette, various fish sauces also help, though most Canadians probably aren't adding fermented fish products on everything.
It seems to stick to more traditional lines of avoid saturated fats (butter, ghee,coconut oil) and favour olive oil, canola oil etc.
And reduce fat in general
I don't mean avoid fats, I mean avoid extracted fats. Oils lack fiber and much of the nutrition that the whole food has. I.e. eat olives over olive oil, avocados over avocado oil, etc. I understand it sounds crazy, and yes it's not easy, but for my family's health it's been worth it. We've all found great benefit in different ways.
Also Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book is a better source than the YouTube video I linked.
I know the intent is to indicate relative proportions of food, but you question suggests more work needs to be done on portion control also.
Greeks have been frying french fries in olive oil since, well, the coming of potato to Europe... No casualties yet.
(Yeah, it's multifaceted, but it's not true that olive oil is "devoid of nutricional value" as someone wrote above (it has antioxidants, omega-6, oleic acid, and so on).
It's silly to pretend that you can pick one and live your life without the other. Or that there is never a need for some sort of cooking fat.
It's just that I often compare Dutch guidelines with foreign (usually American) ones, and they often diverge. For example, in the Netherlands it's common not to use anaesthesia when giving birth, where most other countries AFAIK do.
I love this. Great job Canada!
Milk is a fantastic source of calcium, when you don’t mess with it too much. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s evolved specifically to grow mammals up to full size as quickly as possible, which includes growing a lot of bone. The issue is that we’ve monkeyed with it in a way that’s convenient for producers, but bad for consumers.
The area has been an absolute miserable failure in its obstensible goals, making us healthy. The western world has been pretty diligent about following the recommendations of the food scientists, especially around eliminating saturated fat, and the results have been a complete and utter disaster. Yet we continue to listen to the exact same people hashing the exact same advice as the population continues to get fatter, sicker, and die sooner.
At least among the Harvard faculty, there appears to be a consensus that healthy fats are important, which the Canadian guide doesn't seem to stress that much.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
===
Comments on the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/intervie...):
INTERVIEWER: Some nutritionists have criticized your pyramid as "floating on a lake of olive oil."
WILLETT: The formal studies that had compared a more moderate fat intake as we've suggested, with low-fat diets, have actually consistently shown that people did as well or better controlling their weight on a moderate-fat diet compared to a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet.
INTERVIEWER: Even good fats are more fattening than good carbs. So they think you're contributing to the obesity epidemic, or there's a risk of that. A tablespoon of olive oil is 14 grams of fat.
WILLETT: There are all kinds of beliefs about the amount of fat in a diet, tremendously strong opinions. What we really need is sound data, and the studies that have been done show that people actually end up controlling their weight at least as well, and usually better, on moderate-fat diets compared to low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets.
INTERVIEWER: Is it okay to get more than 30 percent of your calories from fat?
WILLETT: The evidence is quite clear that it's perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your calories from fat, and probably, in fact, it's even better to be getting more than 30 percent of calories from fat, if it's the healthy form of fat. ...
===
EDIT: formatting
All of the confusion about what we're supposed to eat derives from this simple fact. We've got all sorts of data suggesting that this diet or this food might be good for you, but the effect sizes are too small to care about.
If you obsessively tweak your diet based on every little scrap of data, you might possibly earn yourself three or four months of healthy life expectancy compared to a diet that your great-grandmother would recognise as being sensible. It's just not worth the effort.
Even though it's technically 'no nonsense' - it actually is effectively 'nonsense' from a communications perspective.
It's almost meaningless, and un-actionable, and I don't think it will have any effect, on any group. I wonder if this should simply be a single page of points urging us to 'eat healthy' and that should be it.
Consider the main takeaway points:
'Enjoy your food' 'Eat protein' 'Eat lots of vegetables' 'Chose whole grain foods'
Seriously?
This is essentially very traditional approach to food, with noticeably less focus on carbs (we don't work on farms anymore), and also the absence milk, cheese and almost absence of meat which I believe is likely a shade ideological as opposed to nutritional.
It surely is good advice, but it's not specific at all, and essentially boils down to 'eat healthy, don't each junk food'.
Seriously consider this:
https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...
It's the page on 'how to enjoy your food'.
"tasting the flavours" "being open to trying new foods" "developing a healthy attitude about food"
Seriously - a page devoted to instructing us to 'taste the flavours' of food.
Here the section on your 'eating environment':
Influences on eating and drinking. These can include:
distractions where you eat who you eat with what you are doing while you are eating
Eating environments can affect:
what you eat and drink the amount you eat and drink ow much you enjoy eating
It's really an eerie thing to read.
I should add: the recipes look really good however.
This seems pretty non-controversial.
The old food pyramid suggested having as many carbs as you could handle, and made it seem like milk and meat were absolutely vital.
The new take just lumps those into protein and suggests proteins as a whole should be about 25% of your diet.
While no guide could possibly please everyone (there's a diet trend for every possible food combo out there), this seems like a reasonable baseline to me.
As for the recipes they list... omg no.
That said, the Canada Food Guide page certainly has fat covered. It doesn't mention it straight from the landing page, but if you explore the guide, you find it pretty quick.
The first link in the sidebar of the Canada Food Guide, "Food Choices," takes you to
https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-food-choices/
which states in the second line of text "Choose foods with healthy fats instead of saturated fat." That text is (non-obviously) a link to
https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...
which provides about the same amount of detail about healthy versus saturated fats. It also mentions that "the type of fat you eat over time is more important for health than the total amount of fat you eat."
Finally, the "Further Reading" section links to
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/nutrients/fa...
which goes into much more detail, and even provides links intended for industry and health professionals for anyone looking for yet more information.
While the Canadian guide's layout is different from the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate, I'd say the Canadian guide has fat covered pretty well!
My kids come home with hungry with half-eaten lunches complaining how they didn’t have enough time to eat. They get rushed to finish within 10-15 minutes and go outside. This is a universal complaint among parents.
We’re culturally ingraining eating as something you rush through on the way to something else.
[0] https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...
The USDA updates the guidelines every so often. They no longer use a pyramid, and they’ve silently backed away from recommending so many carbs. Compare Canada’s guide to https://www.choosemyplate.gov/ .
That doesn’t say much about what kind of fat we’re eating (e.g., if it’s oil), but the advice to reduce calories from fat was based on them being empty calories. It appears that they also help people feel full longer.
Personally, when I eat a salad for lunch, it doesn’t bother me that literally 85% of the calories come from fat (15 calories for the lettuce, 90 calories for the salad dressing). Even if I have low-fat salad dressing (30 calories), I’m getting 66% of my calories from fat.
Then again , maybe I’m reading the data wrong: it’s possible to reduce the percentage of calories coming from fat by eating the same amount of fat, and more food overall. Maybe Americans just did that.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...
Like, guys. Why are we adding brown sugar and why are we stressing skim milk? What are we adding dried cranberries, which lack fibre?
I constantly feel like I need to write a website on how to be healthy. I'm a fit software dev with 11% body fat. I've held it for almost 5 years now, but before that I was just like everyone else. It's really simple.
1. Maximize fibre (i.e., fresh veggies, non-canned chickpeas). 2. Eliminate refined sugar / date / figs / dried fruit as much as humanly possible. 3. Maximize flavour (i.e., fat, spices, added berries) 4. Maximize protein 5. Minimize average effort 6. Minimum 15 minutes of heart pumping exercise per day. Ideally 1 hour or more.
This is easier than you expect. I make a chickpea curry or (mostly) vegetarian chilli in a huge dutch oven once a week. That's 10 meals right there. I bike to get around. Body weight exercise once a week, and that's basically it.
This whole fat vs carbs thing is a total red herring. Some carbs are great for you (resistant starch, both soluble and insoluble fibre) some are fine (lactose, glucose) some are shitty (fructose, sucrose). Some fats are great for you (omega balanced polys) some are fine (mono) some are shitty (trans), but we lump it all into fats vs carbs and no wonder the public is confused.
My favorite example is that a doctor once recommended that I follow the DASH diet to lower my blood pressure. The DASH diet was a modified version of the 1990s food pyramid. A relatively recent study compared it with diets that get fewer calories from carbohydrates, and while all the diets they tried did lower blood pressure, the original DASH diet was the worst of the bunch ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3236092/ ).
Aside from that, weight is not the only issue. A high fat diet (even a vegan one) is not good for your cardiovascular system.
There's a widely quoted study by high-fat diet proponents comparing two groups eating a high-fat Mediterranean diet (one with olive oil, one with nuts) to a "low fat" control group: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303?query=re...
This study can't really be used to advocate a high fat diet, though, because all the diets (even the control group) were actually high fat. Looking at page 28 of the appendix (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303/suppl_f...) shows that the fat intake of all three groups was really very similar -- about 41% calories from fat for the olive oil and nut groups, but only...37% fat from the control group. 37% calories from fat is not "low fat".
On the other hand, a true low fat diet, with fewer than 10% of calories from fat, has been shown to actually reverse the progression of heart disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7500065 (this was one of the first studies to demonstrate this, but they've repeated this with larger groups and gotten the same results)
2 hours max a day of 'guided learning' a day, the rest somewhere between 'self learning' and 'fooling around' is fine.
Ie. make it easy for the consumer to pick up to food items in the grocery store and make the healthy decision between the two. As of now, I don't really think that's possible unless you study things like yourself.
Hah, am (a very white) Canadian, and fish sauces are the only non-Vegetarian thing I'm still stocking in my house.
If you want something beneficial, teach people to enjoy cooking rather than eating.
https://www.choosemyplate.gov/
Both use a pretty similar graphic and both dedicate 50% of the plate for fruit and vegetable.
I'm Canadian and the milk industry seems like a much bigger political issues (and it was already one after the USMCA).
The guide as likely little effect outside the country, its effect is more on small institutional kitchens (daycares, schools, clinics etc.), its content is unlikely to affect international sales. Its political effect is more likely to be felt internally, through perception of people in the affected industries rather than the effect the guide may have on their sales.
Some of the not so favoured are powerful industries what occupy a lot of land across several provinces (wheat), have suffered recently and are getting more politically active (dairy) or are in areas where the party currently in power needs to keep its support for the next election (meat).
The whole advice from grandma is nonsense. You probably have a wealthy background, but my grandma was poor, uneducated, and cooked meals based on what was affordable. That isn't advice, that's an economic condition.
This argument reminds me of the vast difference between eating genetically modified plant or animal tissue versus modifying your own genes.
The later, and current version of the guide influence institutional kitchens that do not have dedicated nutritionists such as daycares, some schools, clinics, etc.
If I followed by grandma's preferences we'd be eating canned food, salted meat, mincemeat pie, a lot of mayonnaise and cookies (exaggerating of course).
> Saturated fats, while not as harmful as trans fats, by comparison with unsaturated fats negatively impact health and are best consumed in moderation. Foods containing large amounts of saturated fat include red meat, butter, cheese, and ice cream. Some plant-based fats like coconut oil and palm oil are also rich in saturated fat.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
I read both books - "How not to die" (Greger) and "the Longevity Diet" - and I thought about their opinions as well. ATM I tend to stick to good oils from plants as well as nuts. Greger is not very convincing - mostly because he suggests nuts as well, and a good produced oil (like extra virgine olive oil) does not loose much nutritional value. I don't care about reduced antioxidants in oil if I combine it with greens that have loads of them.
She cites a couple hundred studies in the book, worth a read if you’re into this stuff.
Thanks, but that is not from the post I was responding to, and only addresses part of the claim I was disputing. The link says unsaturated fats are better than saturated fats... and specifically calls out olive oil as being healthy:
> “Good” unsaturated fats — Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats — lower disease risk. Foods high in good fats include vegetable oils (such as olive, canola, sunflower, soy, and corn), nuts, seeds, and fish.
This was the first I'd heard of it too, but I looked it up and saw this page (as well as various similar pages). It looks like canned has way less nutritional value when compared to cooked from dry.
There's also the higher sodium content.
I know almost nothing about health studies, but I read the abstract you link to and there's no mention of randomized control group or other mechanism to prevent bias.
Tried a quick search and came up with this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovascul...
In my experience, and what I've read, relatively higher fat food satiates better. If you're relatively less hungry, you have a better chance to resist overeating and boredom eating.
Unsaturated fats that are good for your health: peanut, soybean, safflower, sunflower.
Definitely good to see a government organization being aware of how the modern world works.
If I want to fry with oil or put dressing in my salad, another oil might do the trick: olives are irrelevant. Might as well have compared olive oil to a broccoli or almonds...
The fact that it has "no fiber" is also irrelevant as to whether it has nutritional value (fibers are not digested anyway, and I'm not looking into oil for fibers in the first place).
As categories, oils and fat are fine. They both contain elements which are good for health. There are subcategories which seem to be bad for health (e.g. trans fats, and oils with those in, or rancid oil).
Just have a look at the study he mentions when he's talking about the impairment of artery functions after eating olive oil: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/clc.49602214...
Quote: "This impairment, however, was also totally eliminated when vitamins C and E were given. As with antioxidant vitamin supplementation, olive oil, eaten with vinegar on a salad, did not impair endothelial function. Some societies that use the Mediterranean diet may have learned to provide the natural antioxidants which buffer the oxidative stress of these fatty meals."
He totally eliminated this aspect so he can ban the oils. Another discussion here on HN blamed him for cherrypicking studies. I'm not sure if that's wrong. He has some good advice in general but for this aspect, I don't really trust him.
I don't look to get fiber from olive oil, I look to get whole plant foods with fiber in my diet. I also want to avoid the negative arterial effects from extracted fats.
There is no physiological need for oil, only culinary. I have changed my cooking habits in light of this and I continue to eat highly flavorful and creative dishes.
That, and the longer you sit on a site, and the more you have to scroll, the more likely you are to click on an advertisement and earn them some revenue.
My claim specifically, was that I find it rather surprising that olive oil is unhealthy, when the soon to be country with the highest life expectancy in the world, consumes per person 10 kg of it every year.
It seems to disagree with your statements.
"In conclusion, in this primary prevention trial, we observed that an energy-unrestricted Mediterranean diet, supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts, resulted in a substantial reduction in the risk of major cardiovascular events among high-risk persons. The results support the benefits of the Mediterranean diet for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease."
Another random snippet from same link: "Thus, extra-virgin olive oil and nuts were probably responsible for most of the observed benefits of the Mediterranean diets."
Also, consider that over 50% of the adult population in Spain is overweight. Maybe less oil would improve issues that come from being overweight and obese.
Plus, leading cause of death in Spain is heart disease.
Finally someone here notice it. Have you also noticed how Canada's New Food Guide looks eerily similar to the much-criticized EAT-Lancet recommendation (reportedly fueled by Vegan propaganda): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...
What a tail spin.
Saturated fat is good for you, the pop science you've been fed about saturated fat is complete garbage. Sure, saturated fat increases "bad" cholesterol, LDL. Unfortunately it turns out there are two types of LDL, only one of which is actually correlated with heart attacks. Turns out cutting out saturated fat from your diet might drop your LDL, but it also reduces expected lifespan. Oops! You could also take Statins for those "dangerous" levels of LDL, but it turns out they do nothing to improve your all-cause mortality stats unless if you fall within a narrow portion of the population.
It's only a tailspin because you've been fed garbage information about food your whole life. But given the absolute catastrophic state of public health within the United States, I'm genuinely surprised that anyone listens to the official health guides at all.
did you even read the guideline?
They only shot down diary, meat and juice industry[1], while conveniently ignoring mentioning of lobbying from others (plant-based foods).
Canada actually produces over 50% of the world's supply of lentils and they also grow a large amounts of various grains, legumes that they may be looking to push and make a profit for[2].
The whole food guide is extremely biased and hardly anyone here in HN seems to get it, lol.
--
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-new-food-guid...
"Olive oil is well known for its cardioprotective properties" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23006416
"In conclusion, the aggregated evidence supports the assertion that olive oil consumption is beneficial for human health" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037851221...
"In conclusion, olive oil consumption was related to a reduced risk of incident CHD events." - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
"Higher baseline total olive oil consumption was associated with 48% (HR: 0.52; 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.93) reduced risk of cardiovascular mortality" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030221/
"In this experiment, it seems that taking 20ml of raw olive oil – either extra virgin or ‘normal’ – can have a positive effect on our hearts." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/tWtLcz30LZm3YTk5Vf...